Multi-sample anti-aliasing (MSAA) is a technique that may be used to improve the quality of digital images in computer graphics architectures. In order to render a digital image that has undergone MSAA processing, traditional approaches may read an MSAA control surface (MCS) and a compressed main surface (MS), wherein the MCS describes the manner in which the MS was compressed. The MS may then be compressed into a render target such as, for example, a frame buffer or shadow map, and subsequent post-processing stages may read the MS render target in order to perform further operations such as lens correction, blurring, and so forth. The memory communications bandwidth associated with writing to and reading from the render target for MSAA related activities may have a negative impact on performance, power consumption, battery life, etc.